1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system, and deals more particularly with methods, systems, computer program products, and methods of doing business by providing bookmarks for voice mail messages in order to facilitate improved navigation and processing thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Face-to-face communication between people involves many parallel communication paths. We derive information from body language, from words, from intonation, from facial expressions, from the distance between our bodies, and so forth. Distance communication, such as phone calls, e-mail exchange, and voice mail, on the other hand, involves only a few of these communication paths. Users may therefore have to take extra actions (which may or may not be successful) if they wish to try to overcome the limitations so imposed.
Distance communicating is becoming more prevalent in our society. Voice mail systems became widely used in years past, and in more recent years electronic mail systems have become common, with the popularity and pervasiveness of e-mail continuing to grow. When communicating by e-mail, message creators often try to overcome the limitations of distance communications by techniques such as using different font sizes, colors, emoticons (i.e. combinations of text symbols which bear a resemblance to facial expressions), and so forth to express non-text information. This non-text information includes emphasis, emotion, irony, etc. When communicating in person, the speaker can use changes in body language to indicate a change in subject. In e-mail messages, the paragraph structure and use of bolding and italics gives clues as to the number and importance of topics. Thus, e-mail users try to overcome the limitations of distance communications by using visual clues for both semantic and contextual meaning. Further, visual clues such as paragraph distinctions are perceivable as soon as the page is displayed, providing a “broadside” perception of the message.
Voice mail has a different set of problems. While the recipient has the benefit of the nuances available through voice, the recipient does not have the advantages of the other parallel forms of communication which are available in person. Unlike e-mail, with voice mail the recipient does not have the advantage of broadside perception of the message. Thus, in a voice mail message, it may be difficult for the listener to appreciate when one topic has ended and another has begun. Additionally, voice mail users listening to their messages from a telephone do not have the ability to navigate within the stored voice mail in a controlled fashion. The voice mail recipient is hampered in the retrieval of, and subsequent actions on, the message due to the inability to act on parts of the voice mail message, as can be done with e-mail messages. (While some existing voice mail systems allow the listener to speed up the message, or skip the message, none are known to the present inventors which allow the originator of the message to specify where the topics lie, or which enable use of such identified topics for actions by the listener.)
Accordingly, what is needed is a technique that alleviates these problems in distance communications, providing a more flexible and more productive way for people to communicate using voice mail messages.